Prior to the pandemic most businesses, at least those that place the proper focus on planning their futures and controlling their destinies, had their annual strategies ready, locked, and funded for execution. Enter COVID-19. What seemed to be overnight, the year that had been envisioned evaporated. Revenues began to drop dramatically, human resources became scarce, supply chains came to a screeching halt, and uncertainty overcame composure and control. Strategies and associated project portfolios that had been fluid, moving, and organizationally nourishing were frozen, hopefully to be used later, when and if they could be thawed.
The new reality required reaction and direction amid variables most business leaders had not previously experienced. There has been less of a need for ambitious visionaries than for warrior leaders who understand intellectually and instinctively how to read danger signals without deep analyses and case studies. It is not a time for frozen strategies, but rather real-time, fluid strategies combined with rapid execution, assessment, and refinement, successively reiterated with discipline and decisiveness.
A Test of Leadership
The COVID crisis has tested and defined leaders’ abilities to lead under pressure, as well as provided an objective assessment of their effectiveness at preparing for unforeseen consequences. The “what if” scenario planning that should be part of business planning—but is often overlooked or compromised in good times—proved a crucial tool. Additionally, debt, cash flow, working capital, access to more capital, accrued organizational trust and a strong values-based culture, performance perspective (long or short term), and courage were shown to be assets or deficits and revealed leadership’s true dedication to the health and longevity of the organization.
Unfortunately, many learned the hard way that serving short-term objectives and managing quarter to quarter and even year to year makes the organization vulnerable to risks. As we have experienced through the COVID crisis, failure to establish contingencies through proper planning can be devastating to the organization and the families that have placed their faith in leadership to provide financial security.
From Frozen Strategy to Rapid Execution
Though the crisis has diminished in intensity, there will continue to be fallout. The residue will not dissipate quickly, covering the frozen strategy and possibly rendering it less or no longer relevant. Each organization will have to thaw its strategy and assess whether and how the residue will impact the assumptions and considerations that influenced the plan before it became frozen. Can it still be effective within the new environment? As the strategy once again becomes fluid, it will have to filtered and modified to serve the prevailing and anticipated conditions.
Whether the strategy remains fundamentally as originally constituted or changes dramatically, rapid and reliable execution will be more important than ever. This presents another major challenge, as execution is not a core and reliable competency in many organizations. Execution is qualified with “rapid” for good reason. Organizations have lost valuable time by having to divert attention to the COVID challenges. Additionally, businesses have experienced significant financial setbacks and may be even be teetering on financial collapse. This leaves very little room for error when establishing priorities and allocating precious resources.
Not only does the strategy have to be focused on the right initiatives, but these must be executed without fail. Even for businesses that weathered the storm well, rapid execution of initiatives will be required to effect the realization of the benefits anticipated, sooner rather than later. Strategic initiatives, by definition, are critical to an enterprise’s future, and more so in recovery mode. The criticality of rapid and successful execution may be further exacerbated in a competitive race to getting a new product to market or in cases where the strategy is effecting a major transformation to address a significant opportunity or impending threat.
Reconsider Transformation
It is interesting to note the organizational transformation ambitions of so many businesses. Before the pandemic, there was rarely an executive-level strategy discussion in which transformation was not cited as an objective. However, there are many different definitions being applied to the term. In my experience, transformation is defined by major changes to multiple of the following aspects: the business model and organizational structure, key cross-functional processes, enterprise technology, market focus, core competencies, and culture. The most impactful, and yet most difficult to achieve, is cultural transformation. Yet any transformation will impact the culture. This further emphasizes the importance of disciplined execution, as well as change management.
Organizations whose pre-COVID strategies were intended to be transformational should determine whether the transformation should be transformed. The conditions that led to the transformational strategy may have changed. And in an organizational transformation, rapid and reliable execution increases in effort and complexity. Transformation will likely impact employees, the ways they work, the environment in which they work, and their perception and trust of leadership. Most often transformation requires new skills to be developed and applied to roles that may be new or significantly modified.
Flawed, elongated execution and poor change management—especially on the heels of a challenging COVID experience—will lead to organizational fatigue, an inability to rebound quickly, and loss of confidence. The success of transformation relies upon sustainability. Like overcoming old habits and heuristic tendencies, establishing new mindsets and ways of working requires extraordinary stakeholder buy-in, commitment, reinforcement, and validation; the latter is dependent on establishing good, relevant performance measures, and communications that are clear and easy to understand.
Learning from Hard Lessons
The COVID crisis will pass. To let its hard-learned lessons fail to influence how we plan (for both the known and the unexpected) and execute would be a great failure. Consider that while establishing a profound ability to choose the right strategic initiatives, planning and resourcing them properly, and driving execution are critically important, it is the establishment of a values-based culture founded on trust of leadership that will ultimately determine who wins and wins consistently.
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